The 2011 Reed Arts Week starts this week. Its theme is Geographies, and it "seeks to re-envision the way we encounter our everyday world. Geographies asserts the provisional nature of boundaries, embraces the weeds and suspends the everyday in a space for potentiality and play." Featured artists include Ben Wolf, Francis Alÿs, Gary Wiseman & Gabe Flores, Jacinda Russell & Nancy Douthey, Kathy Westwater, Lize Mogel, and Melvin Edward Nelson. RAW is happening March 2-6; get the full calendar of events on the RAW 2011 website.

There are degrees of "have-to" when it comes to making art, perhaps regulated by a self-consciousness that all artists have in various manifestations. It is somewhere on this continuum that distinctions are made regarding who is the outsider, the hack, the naif, the fine artist, or the Sunday painter. All are false as generalities, as a sum total of mitigating factors are often compromised in order to categorize... (more)

Disjecta presents In Site, a site-specific sculptural installation by Karl Burkheimer. The piece occupies the entire 3500 square foot gallery space, allowing and forcing patrons to walk on, in and through it. The work "draws from a wide range of interests and influences, including extensive travel in the Middle East, the design and construction of Japanese tea houses, and the utter love of making."

In conjunction with In Site, Tahni Holt is organizing In Response, a collaborative performance project. Three performers are curating a series of Saturday performances that "respond to the altered space through improvisational form." All are, of course, at Disjecta.

Animator/media artist Rose Bond and acoustic ecologist/composer Todd Tawd are giving a lecture at Worksound next Monday on their current collaboration. Migration is an animated sound and image installation designed for subterranean public space. "They will talk about their work and their interest in media that explores phenomena of perception and challenges the passivity of movie consumption."

Hayward isn't discovering anyone here, but he is giving four of Portland's
most promising recent talents; Benjamin Young, Jason Traeger, Matthew Green
and Midori Hirose a nice stage to spar and highlight one another upon... (more

The Archer Gallery at Clark College presents Indweller, video works by Victoria Fu, Anna Lavatelli, Noelle Mason, and Lilly McElroy. "In each of these works, the bodies are used in a predetermined way within the space of the setting and the frame. The female figures are choreographed or set to a limited structure of movement, rather than used as character explorations. Through controlled gestures, constructed cinematic structures, and suspended moments in time and space, the figures become inseparable from the setting within the video, existing to complete the imagined world of the artist."

Well PAM has whittled
down their hand crafted list of artist for the 2011 Contemporary Northwest
Art Awards

Chris Antemann

John Buck

John Grade

Jerry Iverson

Suzy Lee

Megan Murphy

Michelle Ross

This is an overtly politically motivated list including someone from every state
in the award's territory and therein lies the problem. It is a all very approachable,
even soft stuff and really reiterates a ton of Northwest stereotypes... (more)

An Alphabet Is Not a Book of Poetry: Elspeth Pratt at Reed's Cooley Gallery

Unrelated, Elspeth Pratt, 2007

Elspeth Pratt's sculptures are simple. Mostly elegant quadrilaterals, they sit against the walls and on the floor of Reed's Cooley Gallery wide mouthed and hardy, in spite of their meager lines. They are instantly pleasing formally, drawing the viewer in with tactile conventions that are generous in their physical accessibility. These sculptures present their ideas quietly, . . .(more)

Field Work, a collaborative space by PSUs MFA Contemporary Art and Graphic Design programs, is hosting Conference of Conferences next weekend. The event is "a day long symposium of curated selections from recent art & theory conferences around the world," featuring live responses from such local figures as Lisa Radon and Anna Gray & Ryan Wilson Paulsen. Recorded lectures include Claire Bishop's "Is everyone an artist?" and a pair of video panels. It's free and open to the public, but requires an RSVP to publicwondering@gmail.com by February 19.

Continuing their 30 year anniversary celebration, Elizabeth Leach is opening two shows this week:

Matt McCormick, "Crescent Motel"

In The Great Northwest, Matt McCormick presents video installation and photographs inspired by a scrapbook created in 1958 by four friends and found by McCormick in a thrift shop. The scrapbook details their Northwest travels together, which McCormick recreated in spite of a new highway system and towns that entirely disappeared. The resulting video and installation is his documentation of the process, which "reminds the viewer of the fragility of history, of the swift passage of time."

Dan Attoe, "Monument Valley Meteor Shower"

Here/Now is a group exhibition that "recognizes and celebrates the ever-changing Portland art community," including current and former Portland artists. Featured artists include Dan Attoe, MK Guth, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Johanna Jackson, Chris Johanson, Arnold Kemp, and Michael Lazarus.

SCRAP (the school & community reuse action project) is seeking submissions for their upcoming fibers show. Works must contain at least 75% of reclaimed or recycled content; fiber is defined by the artist. Submissions are due March 31. More info on their website.

The Katsura
Detached Palace is one of those all time masterpieces of architecture, like
the Parthenon, St. Peter's Basilica or The Great Pyramid... its mere existence
conveys much more than a series of rooms and an exterior form. It's an embodiment
of an idealized worldview and therefore acts as a symbol of national identity that goes
way beyond individuals, becoming so emblematic that its reputation transcends
that culture. In fact, it so impressed the Bauhaus' Walter Gropius upon visiting
it that in many ways its design DNA can be found everywhere in high modernist
architecture. It has gone beyond architecture and become an idea. Yet, the palace
itself is more of an incidental jumble that conveys a sense of enduring imperial succession rather than Gropius's high modernist architectural
language. Lately, deconstructionist architects like Herzog & De Meuron
and Rem Koolhaas have made careers of this elegant type of structural dissonance... (more)

PAM's APEX series, which showcases Northwest artists, is back with work by Geraldine Ondrizek. Her installation includes The Sound of Cells Dividing (2008), Cellular (2008), and Case Study (2010). "Scientific processes are made both visually and aurally articulate in these three restrained multi-sensory installation works" in which "art magnifies, informs, and is informed by science."

Visual artists are invited to apply for RACC's 2011 artist fellowship, which will award $20,000 to one visual artist for a spring fellowship. "Review criteria for the Fellowship Award includes proof of sustained high artistic quality in the applican'’s work, as well as evidence of the applicant's involvement in the community and the importance of his/her work to the local culture." Artists must also be current physical residents of Multnomah, Clackamas or Washington counties. Applications are due April 6, 2011. Get more info on the RACC website.

(Lots more: RACC community surveys on arts education, juried art auction w/ prizes at the Museum of Glass, applications are open for 2011 Signal Fire wilderness retreats, University Club of Portland is seeking apps for its 2011-12 residency, Froelick wants your equine art, Anka wants your pixel-related art, L&C wants your gendered art, An Artist a Day is looking for participants, McMinnville wants your art for their village, and the Whatcom Museum wants its members' forest art.)

Recess presents Antithesis, the second installment in the Synthesis Series. "Twelve artists, selected for their divergent backgrounds and capacity for collaboration, have been randomly paired into groups of two. This is the follow-up to Thesis, which debuted at Research Club last December. As the groups have been tossed around, the new pairings will respond to the projects previously created, with an 'antithetical' slant." This may be Recess' last show in the Artistery since the building is being leveled.

Since we have tracked the unspeakably difficult to track Columbia River Crossing
bridge replacement project since the beginning we are due for an update. Last
week Governors Christine Gregoire and John Kitzhaber (the two people with the
most say in this project) rejected
the ridiculously bad open box girder design and are considering three other
alternatives. As of yet there is no serious designer attached to the project,
simply a set of engineering options. This has been the greatest weakness of
the project (which I've
detailed in depth many times
before). Simply put the project is extremely complicated and the CRC leadership
is still looking at this as a series of standard solutions to a nonstandard
project... (more)

The 34th Portland International Film Festival by the NW Film Center starts this week, featuring expanded screening locations at Cinemagic, the Hollywood Theater, and Cinema 21. The festival runs from February 10 - 26, 2011, and the schedule and more can be found on the PIFF 34 microsite.

Installation/conceptual artist Melissa Dyne and performance/pop artist Khaela Maricich, who performs as The Blow, are lecturing this week on their current collaboration, "a music-based performance piece being presented in a diversity of contexts--from rock clubs to museums--exploring the possibilities and assumptions inherent in each setting." The talk is through PICA, $5 for members, $7 for non-members.

The Fairbanks Gallery at OSU presents Type/Life: A Forest of Floating Typography. It's a "participatory installation involving the shifting meaning of language" by Nancy Froehlich, Nadra Moritz, Zvezdana Stojmirovic, and Azin Valy. "The artists have expressed dualities of modern life in pairs of words printed on large floating balloons, in a dreamscape for interaction and reflection. Visitors can contribute by drawing their own lettering on blank balloons." The exhibition runs February 7 - March 2, 2011.

Best known for her multiple series of portraits of lesbian, butch, and transgendered women, Catherine Opie is a remarkably versatile photographer with an eye for the powerfully personal and the formally sublime. Images from her series Girlfriends are currently up at the Portland Art Museum (through February 6, 2011). I caught up with her after her lecture at the museum to discuss identity, politics, historicity, and minimalist photography.

Opening this weekend at PAM: Riches of a City: Portland Collects. The show celebrates the influence that art collection and patronage have had on the museum, featuring over 200 objects from local private collections, including works by Picasso, Lautrec, Miro, and Warhol.

Last year PORTstar Alex Rauch interviewed Hannah Higgins in anticipation of a lecture at MoCC that had to be rescheduled. That lecture, The Multiple Intelligences of Fluxus, is happening tomorrow, in happy conjunction with Object Focus: The Book. "Hannah B. Higgins, the daughter of the Fluxus artists Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins and noted author of Fluxus Experience, will lecture on this movement."